Monday, April 9, 2012

YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT SOME NON-BELIEVERS BELIEVE THESE DAYS

Mark Twain, a celebrated non-believer, believed: "The two most important days of our life are the day we are born, and the day we find out why." For the last 2000 years, Judaic-Christian believers have agreed both dates have something to do with a first-cause-higher-power. For the last 200 years, non- believers have found a new reason for not believing. Evolution.

Is this why Kansas hates Charles Darwin....? Well, maybe not hate; but fundamentalist school boards there and elsewhere have some evolutionary bones to pick with his revolutionary biology.
Darwin never meant his great work to become a new faith, but today's brilliant evolutionary biologists [there are 400,000 in the US] have learned so much about how our species has evolved, they've pretty much elevated his science into their faith.

Why else would fundamentalist school boards be so aggressive in rejecting Evolution for their classrooms? It's not so much the science itself, but the fear this new science is replacing their old faith. Whereas traditional religions say everything starts with a first-cause-higher-power, modern evolutionary biology says it starts with a big bang that had no start. It just happened. Then so did matter. Then so so did we. Thus the way to understand our social behavior, culture and mores is by understanding the evolutionary dynamics of our DNA, genes, chemicals, synapses and brain lobes.

It's all pretty exciting! Not a month goes by that some research team doesn't report how and why we behave according to the measurable dictates of our evolution. For instance, why we form into families ...mate with X instead of Y...pro-create...vote Democrat. Why females wearing red stimulate our male primate origins...why the sounds of Bach soothe and Mahler annoy...why I'm writing about this and not the Cubs.... oh, and why some of us still worship that old Judaic-Christian deity.

Evolutionary biologists may not say so in so many polysyllabic words. But it seems many of us are starting to assume so. To assume our behaviors emerge out of the dynamics of our evolution. Take that last one on the list. Scientists like William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, coupled with pop authors like Sam Harris and Bill Maher, often explain our remaining attachment to deity this way: Some of us have a "god gene." Even courts may now see defenses not only built around the facts of the case, but around the genetic pre-dispositions of the defendant.

One of the latest genetic studies features researchers at the University of Nebraska who measured the arousal rates of different voters to provocative images. Researcher John Hibbing reports: "It's amazing the extent to which they perceive the same world differently." Conservatives seem more receptive to the fearful; liberals are more drawn to the hopeful. Does that mean today's campaign teams should be profiling genetics as well as gaffes out there?

In his latest, "The Social Conquest of Earth," Professor Wilson says: We came out of biology, we are the greatest of all animals, and because of our highly evolved social skills ["our special human eusociality"] we're being driven to greater cooperation so together we'll conquer the ills of the world.

Could this revolutionary biology eventually mean theology, religion, even God are expendable? Frederich Nietzsche famously had one of his characters say: "Where has god gone? I shall tell you. We have killed him..." When you ponder that -- be it in a Kansas school board or in Oz -- it may suggest that today's diminishing status of theology could be giving way to the emerging status of biology. If so, what does that make these scientists? Wizards or Witches?


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